Re-engineering Peer Review

Scientists who open-review preprints

Peer review is controlled by publishers who generate billions in profits from free labour. What are your options if you do not want to provide free labour to be exploited by publishers, but still want to contribute to peer review?

Demand payment for peer review either to yourself, or for your department, or perhaps a contribution to a worthy cause

Refuse to review for certain publishers

Open review preprints

The problem with 1. is that publishers will pass that cost onto authors. A good example of Option 2 is The Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier.

What about option 3?

The idea is that you only agree to review manuscripts if they are also posted as preprints, and that you publish your reviews openly online and send the link to the journal editor. The authors can respond to your reviews openly, independently of the review process in any particular journal. The journal can still use your reviews of course, but then again so can anyone else. Instead of doing free work for a publisher, you have instead contributed a common good from which everyone can benefit .

There is already a group of pioneers in this space who are already posting open preprint peer review. These scientists have between them written 61 open reviews of 51 preprints. Undoubtedly there are many more examples (e.g. in blog posts) which have not collected here – please point us to these so that we can index them.

Not everyone is comfortable posting non-anonymous open peer review. We have created a platform where you can post content-open preprint peer review anonymously or non-anonymously. You can review any arXiv, bioRxiv, PeerJ, SSRN preprint, or even papers deposited in several institutional repositories. If you are worried your review is overly critical and might be damaging to the authors, you can also set an ’embargo’ period to give the authors a chance to respond before the review is made open.

So here’s to those scientists who are showing us that there is a way to contribute to peer review without providing free labour to be exploited by publishers.